Another public service announcement

[kestrell]

Every once in a while, my favorite blog, "The Art of Darkness," posts a list of amusing things the blogger has seen online. I found the most recent of these posts
http://www.shadowmanor.com/blog/?p=16502
particularly entertaining, as it included, among other quotes, the following:

"I will be buried in a spring loaded casket filled with confetti, and a future archaeologist will have one awesome day at work." JiminyKicksIt

"I finally learned how to teach my guys to ID the passive voice. If you can insert “by zombies” after the verb, you have passive voice." johnsonr

and
dammit owls you KNOW who this is" donni.

However, I feel compelled to correct a misapprehension of sighties as expressed in the following statement:

In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man doesn’t really have to wear clothes ever. KenJennings

In my experience, I can almost always tell when a man is naked, because there are basically two kinds of men (outside of one's partner) in the world.

One is the kind of man who sounds really embarrassed when accidentally caught naked, even by a blind woman.

The other kind of man sounds really proud when caught naked, even by a blind woman.

Three- or four-year-old boys exhibit no particular affect when caught naked by anybody. (I have my suspicions that housemate T. falls into this category.)

Comments

[jesse_the_k]

That was an awesome collection, and I'm stunned you neglected to quote the following (I fixed that for you)

If you do an image search for “Coughing”, you get photos of people performing fellatio on ghosts.

---

Are your insights re: naked males equally applicable to girls & women?

Are there other fraught states which us sighties might doubt you can perceive?

Bad haircuts? Large pimples on the nose? Forgotten bags?

[kestrell]

I don't think that I have the same ability in regard to my own gender. For a while back in grad school, I could accurately guess women's bra cup sizes, but this talent has thankfully since deserted me. I think it was a subconscious reaction to all the women who asked me what I thought they looked like (yeah, because *that's* not a trick question).

I can often tell mood, because the body's posture typically directly affects the voice. People who are slump-shouldered and somewhat curled in on themselves sound pretty much like they look. People who are smiling also typically sound like they look. I've noticed that the actors I typically really like have backgrounds in theatre and/or movement (the actor who played Whistler in "Sneakers," for instance, had been involved in circus arts, and I think that his awareness of body movement in part accounted for why he made such a great blind person).

[jesse_the_k]

Oh! It makes sense that women-women body language is different than men-women.

Can you put your hands *koff koff* on which clues helped predict cup size?

I would (and have) watched highly trashy movies just to get a hint of David Strathairn. He bodily inhabits every role so well. His Edward K Murrow voice was stunningly familiar -- it brought tears to my father's eyes.

[jesse_the_k]

And I assumed the actor playing Whistler was blind until around 30 minutes in, when I realized Fuck! That's David Strathairn.

Another actor adept at blind-ish body language was Val Kilmer in At First Sight. The story -- although based on real events which happened to someone I know -- was a really corny regaining! my! vision! plot. But Kilmer did well as someone who was comfortable and capable in space and yet clearly blind. Also a masseur. What, now piano tuners?

[kestrell]

You knew the person who was the subject of the original Lovier Sacks story? Did having his vision restored really fuck up his life the way Sacks portrays it? I know that ophthalmologists are only just beginning to get over their bias that adults can't adapt to having their vision restored, but that Sacks article really bothers me in it's deterministic tone and the way one case history is used to generalize about all blind people.

[jesse_the_k]

Well, fuck me with an NFB cane, there's more than one person with that experience? I'm thinking of Michael May, a lawyer, ace blind skier and president of the Sendero Group.

Links to some of the hundreds of articles about him:
http://www.senderogroup.com/mm/mikemedia.htm

Mike's surgery gave him very low vision, and he was pretty much fine with that. Still uses a dog guide, reads braille, etc.

Now I'm gonna track down Lovier Sacks.

[kestrell]

Oops, that was supposed to be Oliver Sacks, sorry. The blind cognitive psychologist, Zoltan Torey, also mentions that his doctors told him that it wasn't even worth trying to remember colors, because he would completely lose the ability to even visualize them, but he ignored the "experts." There were a couple of news stories this year about how opthomalgic surgeons have recently changed their opinion again, and now believe that older people who lost their vision very young can have useful vision restored, as opposed to the previous opinion, which was that the formally blind person would not be able to cognitively adapt to the new sensory information.

[kestrell]

Also: *lol* on being fooled by David Strathairn! I think it's also the fact that he gets to show a sense of humor that makes him sound like an actual blind person.

When I was in grad school, one of the producers or engineers from a WGBH segment about a woman who had some chronic condition (maybe diabetes?), played a sound bite and asked us if we thought the woman was actually disabled or just a professional actress acting disabled. I promptly replied, "She's definitely disabled." The producer asked me what made me think that and I said it had to do with a bit where she was getting a blood test while talking about all the blood tests she had to get and how they didn't even hurt, and then puncuated this statement by saying "Ow" in a very flat almost distracted tone. I claimed that no able-bodied person could have made that funny, and the producer tried to psyche me out but I refused to be budged.

[jesse_the_k]

There is a certain war-wounded, wind-battered, cynical-but-not-cruel tone of mind that genuine people with disabilities emit.

It's why Toph on Avatar the last airbender is so wonderful -- she has that same blase attitude. "You're gonna throw a 400 ton metal boat on my head? No problem." Yet it's not at all a super-crip "I can do anything" response. I think it's the result of handling ridiculously difficult challenges and surviving, like most PhD students.

Why was that WGBH producer asking about "is she or isn't she"?

[kestrell]

Agreed on the war-wounded sense of humor: I've often gotten along very well with older war vets, and I think it is because we can detect that attitude in each other, plus we also have to find a way to deal with clueless bureacrats who insist that they know more than we do about the situation.

The radio producer was, I think, trying to make a point about truth in documentary stories, but I don't think he was expecting a ringer disabled person. He may not have even realized I was blind--a lot of people just thought I was very goth, wearing all black and keeping my sunglasses on, even indoors.

[kestrell]

I'm not sure what makes me think of certain females as D-cup. I first became aware of it while listening to an episode of "Charmed"; I think that it is a combination of how high heels and the resultant thrusting out of the chest area affects the voice. It's not that the woman may be actively trying to produce that breathy tone which our culture associates with sexy women, but that the heels, tight skirt, and the constriction of the upper body due to push-up bras and other "body shapers" conform the body to the posture where producing anything *other* breathy speech is impossible.

I note that the Holy Grail of synthetic speech is to produce the sexy female voice. Every few years, I run across someone who tells me that programmers are still working on this, and that breathiness seems to be the tricky part. How to tell the little dears that it's going to be difficult to reproduce that when there are no lungs to add the breath part?

[jesse_the_k]

But there are plenty of us with D or DD cups who don't go for the high heels. And plenty of high-heelers in Wonderbras who'd measure out as a B cup.

We need to investigate further ... for science. An onsite visit must be planned.